W
hen The Jungle and the Sea premiered in 2022, it was a story about one family’s struggle to survive the Sri Lankan Civil War. Three years later, as the acclaimed production returns to the Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney, before touring Melbourne and Canberra, its themes feel less like history and more like today’s headlines.
For veteran actor Prakash Belawadi, that change has transformed the way the play is received.
“I think the circumstances in the world today make the play resonate a lot more than it did last time,” he says. “There are so many wars going on. It’s unbelievable that at this time in human history we still cannot resolve wars. You see the pointlessness of imposing power on people who do not want those impositions.”
Written by S. Shakthidharan and Eamon Flack, the team behind the award-winning Counting and Cracking, The Jungle and the Sea follows Gowrie, a Tamil mother searching for her missing son while trying to keep her family alive during Sri Lanka’s brutal civil war. Drawing from real-life testimonies and weaving together threads of the Mahabharata and Antigone, the play explores grief, displacement, resilience and the difficult path towards peace.
For Shiv Palekar, who joins the production for the first time, the play has only become more relevant. “I watched it in 2022,” he says. “Since then, we’ve only had more reasons to speak about these issues again. It hits closer to the bone.”
Despite its setting, neither actor believes audiences need to know much about Sri Lankan history to connect with the story.
At its heart, Shiv says, it is simply about family. “Everyone can understand what it means to lose a family member. Even if you have no connection to the history, people immediately ask themselves, ‘What would I do in that situation?'”
Belawadi agrees but believes the play goes even deeper. The family’s separation is only one part of the story. The bigger question is why they were torn apart in the first place.
“What is wonderful about this play is that every character responds differently,” he says. “Philosophically, politically and emotionally, everyone reacts in their own way. That gives the audience a whole spectrum of human responses.”
The conversation soon moves beyond the play itself to the power of theatre.
Belawadi, who has spent decades working across theatre, film, journalism and teaching, believes live performance offers something no other medium can.
“Theatre negotiates with time, space and audiences all the time,” he says. “A novel or a film is fixed once it’s recorded. But theatre changes. It responds to where we are and when we are.”
He sees theatre not as a vehicle for delivering answers but as a place where difficult conversations can unfold.
“Art is a way of talking in public. It proposes ideas and values in an emotional way. It makes people think.”
Shiv shares that philosophy. “I think it’s much more powerful to open things up than to close them down. The audience should be able to enter the story, whatever their beliefs are, and engage with it rather than be told what to think.”
Belawadi reaches back to Sanskrit aesthetics to explain why theatre can create empathy in ways that history books often cannot. He speaks about sadharanikarana – the shared emotional experience between performer and audience.
“When somebody suffers on stage, the audience recognises that pain because they have known something similar in their own lives,” he explains. “Good theatre makes you question your fixed notions of the world.”
Off stage, however, the atmosphere could not be more different.
Despite dealing nightly with war, grief and loss, the cast begins each performance day by playing cricket backstage. “We’re rowdier than other playgroups,” Belawadi laughs.
The warmth within the company is something both actors treasure.
Having first worked together on Counting and Cracking in 2018, Shiv says one of the biggest lessons he has learned from Belawadi is to stop thinking only about his own role.
“As younger actors, we often get tunnel vision,” he says. “Watching Prakash, I’ve learned to think about the whole production rather than just my own character.”
Belawadi, in turn, says the cast functions like a family. “We come from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, but we have each other’s backs. We’re always teasing each other, but we’re there for one another.”
Asked why, after successful careers in film and television, he continues returning to theatre, Belawadi’s answer is deeply personal.
“The warmth of standing next to another person every day,” he says. “Theatre people are the best people in the world because acting forces you to understand others. You may not agree with them, but you try to understand why they are who they are. In that way, acting is a spiritual exercise.”
For Shiv, whose childhood took him from Mumbai and Bangalore to Hong Kong, Europe and Australia, questions of identity and belonging are also personal.
“I’ve had many homes,” he says. “Home is a slippery question. Identity is a slippery question. Being from everywhere and nowhere leaves me open to finding myself in many different stories.”
Perhaps the most memorable moment comes when both actors are asked the question at the heart of the play: How is peace made?
Belawadi doesn’t offer an easy answer. Instead, he speaks about restraint, dialogue and accepting that not every disagreement needs to become a battle.
“Peace comes from accommodating other views,” he says. “People should have the self-control to let others live the way they want to live.”
Shiv nods in agreement. “I think it’s actually quite simple,” he says. “Tolerance. Avoiding this idea of ‘us and them’. You could have been them, but for an accident of birth.”
It is a fitting conclusion to a play that refuses to divide the world into heroes and villains.
Instead, The Jungle and the Sea asks audiences to sit with grief, listen to opposing voices and recognise themselves in people whose stories may seem far away.
In a world increasingly fractured by conflict, that may be theatre’s most powerful act.
The Jungle and the Sea opens in Sydney this July before travelling to Melbourne (15 August–12 September) and Canberra. For tickets, click here:
Sydney
Melbourne
Canberra
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